Ethical Guidelines

Hi everyone, I’m Ano. Now, let’s have a little talk about one important aspect of your writing, it’s intellectual property and the ethical guidelines. What does that even mean? Let’s talk at first about intellectual property. When you write something in a specific paper, you agree to give full access to all your result by the journal. You keep the basic intellectual property of your article, but you give away the copyright to the editor. What does this mean in practice? It means that you have rules you need to follow. Some that are specific to the journal and some are fundamental that apply to every paper you are going to submit. What you write is no longer owned by you, but it’s owned by the firm behind the journal. It is the base of publishing today. It means that you can’t just copy paste part of the text from another person or just copy paste an image from another journal. This is illegal, as is downloading music without paying the writers’ labels. As such, citation is very important. From a scientific point of view it leads [INAUDIBLE] reader to all of the content related to the one you are talking about. But from a more basic point of view, it is all about copyrighting. Publishing is also different from a patent. As you will not have a legal right, only research. Always keep that in mind. In the same idea, look if there might be conflict of interest when publishing a paper. As you are probably giving access to the results to the journal, you want to be sure there is no financial or intellectual conflict of interest. If you don’t take into account this advice, your article can be retracted from the journal. And more importantly, you can be prosecuted. But don’t be scared, it should be easy to take care of this problem, as you are now fully aware of the problem itself. Don’t forget to check on the website of the journal you want to publish in. As depending on the type of paper you want to submit, if it is an open access article or a subscription based article, you might have different right consenting your work. Let’s have a closer look now on the second point. The third ethical guidelines an author has to flow when writing an article. The first thing to think about is authorship. What is considered an author of an article. There is no real definition of this subject, but when looking on the guidelines, you can find that the author is basically one person. That other role in the conception, the design, the analysis, or the writing of the study. Every author should be put in the author names of the paper. This is really important, as researchers only gain credit if they are on the paper. But be careful not to put everyone, even people who did not take a big part in the study. Usually the journal is going to ask you who took part on the project. And what was the work he or she was doing. That will help you tell who is important. But in the beginning, take advices from the people in your lab, they will help you decide. The second thing to speak about is misconducting the paper itself. Here are a few examples. Fraud, creating a piece of paper based on fake data, or altered data. Duplicate, submitting the paper to different journals in the same time, or submitting equivalent findings in two separated papers. Or even publishing the same results in different journals, even if they use different languages. Citing, failure to cite the work of other related to the subject. Plagiarism, taking the work of others and publishing it in your own name. You should know that editors have access to tool, such as plagiarism.org, that can detect if what you have written is a plagiar. There is also specific ethic guidelines, related to specific fields. If you think about biology, one ethical guideline might be research participant must voluntarily consent to the research participation. But here again, just look closely at the guidelines given by the journal you want to publish in. It is the best way to know what they expect from you. This lecture was last one of the first session. We described the basis of scientific publishing. Why it is important. How to help you from what did others. What is a mechanism of publishing. How is built a journal itself from the [INAUDIBLE] to the abstract itself? And finally, the ethical guideline that are necessary to publishing. Thank you for watching, see you next time.